Inside the Facebook Feed Before Bulgaria’s 2026 Election: Narrative and Manipulation Pattern Mapping
Published Friday 3 April 2026 at 17:24
This is the first edition of Narrative Atlas – a weekly analytical update of narratives within the Bulgarian information environment on Facebook - which focuses on the upcoming Bulgarian Parliamentary Elections, the eight round of national elections since 2021. Bulgaria’s political and informational environments continue to be characterised by widespread distrust and polarisation . By offering these findings, it is our hope to contribute to a more holistic understanding of how election campaign narratives function and position themselves. In addition, by cataloguing and analysing these patterns, we believe we can aid in the larger work of slowly building societal resilience to false, misleading or manipulative information through education and online campaigns.
During the week of March 23-29, 2026, Bulgarian Facebook feeds contained a wide variety of narratives and stories, including of a dramatic police raids against "bought votes" in Vratsa and Lom, sensational claims that Rumen Radev was preparing a "final assault" against an entrenched "mafia model," and urgent warnings of a "Brussels plot" to sabotage national sovereignty. Emojis of sirens and bombs signalled "extraordinary" revelations about secret AI schemes and "dead souls" in voter lists, while highly personal narratives—from a teacher’s endorsement of a former student to a mother’s plea for justice—replaced policy debate with raw emotional appeals. These were not isolated incidents but part of a coordinated digital ecosystem where the very legitimacy of state institutions was being systematically challenged.
Our research team at BROD, led by the GATE Institute, conducted a multidimensional analysis of last week’s public digital discourse. We analysed a sample dataset covering one week of public Facebook posts related to the Bulgarian elections, utilizing our in-house interdisciplinary methodology. Our analysis focuses strictly on the rhetorical structures and dissemination patterns of these messages, ensuring that no private user data was utilized. The was facilitated by the Information Environments Research (IER) group at GATE and the team’s prototype PODIA project. A tool which facilitates critical discourse analysis at scale.
While it is true that these findings represent a fragment of the information environment – given the subset of content which Meta allows researchers to download - we believe they demonstrate how these very specific narratives systematically exploit "cracks" in the institutional structure to replace rational policy discourse with an "analytical void," ultimately driving extreme societal polarization and eroding the public’s ability to make sense of the democratic process. A central and key aspect of the contemporary Bulgarian, and wider European, crisis of democracy.
See the whole report here
